No Man's Sky

[Replay]

So we've all got to be hearing about this, right?

I probably won't buy and play No Man's Sky - yet. It's just an issue of the time commitment; I have too much going on, and don't want to get sucked in.

But just from an engineering perspective, the game is rewriting tech history. It is more or less what Spore intended itself to be, if Spore were a survival horror game instead. As best I know, almost the entire game is procedurally generated; just about everything from the species to the vehicles to the planets you see was created not by a modeler but by insane, ridiculous math - including a biologist's "superalgorithm", a single formula capable of generating several dozen real world shapes - that the game is actually in some legal controversy over.

In the modern AAA era, 95-100% procedural generation is a level of achievement on par with the building of the Hoover Dam - so it's even more astounding that the game only had a four-man team.

Anyone picked it up? Thoughts?



http://whatculture.com/gaming/no-man-39 ... ed-to-know

[Eric]

It seems eh. I never got caught up in the hype for this game. Looks like your basic survival game with a pretty coat of Sci-fi paint.

[Shrinweck]

The math formula lawsuit has been debunked, as far as I know the developers have cooperated/plan to cooperate to prove that they didn't use it. Also I don't think the math patent applies to game design in the first place or some such. In any case, Sean Murray's stance seems to be that they didn't use it at all.

The game looks amazing but the PC release isn't for another 24 or so hours so I haven't gotten a chance to try it myself. People let themselves overhype this game. Ironically, I haven't been this excited to get my hands on a game in months. Tycho from Penny Arcade has put it the best that I have seen so far - that it's a personality test type of game. It isn't a survival game, it's an exploration game with survival aspects. If you need the game to point in in the direction of something to do constantly by means of a narrative then you are going to be disappointed. It's sandbox exploration.

People seem to have expected a MMORPG with a straightforward narrative. While the developer may or may not have implied multiplayer intentions in a 1+ year old interview, it is not an impression I ever got from the game. These people are going to be disappointed. And the multiplayer crowd are always the loudest and most annoying. When you see people complaining about the game it's completely clear that they thought they were getting something else altogether. I do not think even after patches that this game will be the game they want.


On another note - the game has an amazing soundtrack. They released the soundtrack on Youtube a day before it released digitally and I bought it after listening to it once. It's kind of like the good instrumental stuff M83 did fucked the Portal 2 soundtrack in order to produce it. Here's the first song - it's my favorite off the album. I routinely listen to this song with the intention of only listening to it and moving on, but because of how well the soundtrack blends together I end up listening to the entire album.

[kali o.]

The game doesnt interest me (seems like a pointless journey with minimal sandbox functions). I could always illegally download it but I am not interested even for free to be honest...surprised they didnt make it VR compatable.

I think I saw Bovine playing it but not sure if they post lately.

[Replay]

I could always illegally download it but I am not interested even for free to be honest

[Shrinweck]

I really like this game now that I've played it.. it's too bad the the internet community for it is such trash. It's also too bad that the devs shit the bed and the game isn't running very well/at all for some people on PC.

I'm having too much fun with it to use more of my free time to talk about it.

[Replay]

I think "shit the bed" is a bit harsh. A four-man team made a procedural generation game that contains 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 explorable, unique planets. Some hiccups are expected.

Yes, every team has an obligation to not release/sell things that don't work; but I can think of modern titles that suffered a lot more playability issues over a lot less in technology (SimCity, for instance.)

[Shrinweck]

A significant amount of people could not start the game at launch because they did not include necessary files. Even with the files some people have issues. Some AMD processors that meet minimum requirements are having huge problems. Hard crashes to desktop. Stutter issues. I get a slow down that requires me to restart the game every hour or so.

Shit the bed is accurate. I like the game a lot - I haven't enjoyed playing a game this much in months, possibly longer, but I haven't even included the glitches in gameplay/graphics.

Edit: I had a moment when I pulled into a space station where this piano solo kicked up in in the procedural soundtrack that was one of the most beautiful moments in gaming I've experienced. I really don't want to take away from how great I find this game when I say I stand by the idea that they screwed up the PC release.

[Replay]

Well, Metacritic agrees with you, so I'll let it be. Perhaps the bed on the PC release was indeed shat.

[Shrinweck]

I got to the center of the galaxy which was fun. I might do it one more time before Deus Ex releases next week. Otherwise I'm going to wait until Hello Games patches some more content into the game. Definitely keeping this game around for veg out sessions with Netflix/audiobooks/podcasts.

The things they mentioned coming next were freighters and base building which isn't something I'm all that interested in but could be cool.

[kali o.]

So what is the secret at the center of the galaxy?

[Shrinweck]

Spoiler: show

Long story short it's New Game+ mode, it puts you in a set new galaxy, the same different galaxy it puts everyone who hits the center the first time. Presumably this continues with new galaxies until they maybe some day put in something more. From a rational logical stand point it's a bit of let down. But there's a certain amount of philosophy and ideas that get thrown at you during the game and this kind of speaks to that. Also the animation and music come together in a pretty great way when you do it.

In the end it's still an exploration sandbox and if that isn't your drive to play it then the game is pretty bad. The achievement of the few avenues of progression in the game are going to let down a lot of players pretty hard.

I'm currently on one world with a ton of life (maybe found 3-5 total) that I've found in the dozens (hundreds?) of planets I've been to and I'll probably spend like five hours there before I've had my fill and go.

[Julius Seeker]

Daily active users down more than 90%.

Spoiler: show

I thought the idea of the game was interesting, but I don't know if it's more interesting than SPORE. It seems like a smaller game with less to do. Perhaps with a few more updates, more building stuff, co-operative functionality seems like a big area for growth.

[Eric]

They basically Molyneux'd on the amount of promises of features and shit that just didn't make it to the final product.

[Shrinweck]

There's really only so much to do. It isn't something you play day in and day out for weeks on end. It's a "I want to watch a movie.. I think I'll fire up NMS while I do" type of game.

It will see upticks in play count for content patches and sales but without any meaningful kind of progression it isn't the kind of game tens of thousands are going to be playing on a regular basis. As a means of comparison TF2 averages something like 50-60k players at a time. It's also interesting to note that NMS was the biggest Steam release this year BY FAR. It had something like 212k (iirc) players at launch with the only thing as close being XCOM2 at like... 130k.

The things to actually do in the game are:
Go to the center (can be repeated and takes 10-20 hours depending on luck and skill)
Max out your ship inventory slots (20+ hours depending on luck and if you use exploits. By the time you're finished, presuming you did not use exploits, upgrading the weapons, warp drive, and whatnot should be simple)
Max out personal inventory (do this as you do other things, I had max by the second day I played)
Do the Atlas path (If your ship is upgraded you could probably do this in less than an hour, but even if you explore and stuff along side it it maybe takes 5-10 hours). This is the closest thing the game has to a story and other than the philosophical ideas it offers.. it is definitely a disappointment if you wanted more out of the game story-wise
Aimless exploration, mining (Your boredom is the limit)

I don't think the comparisons to Spore are all that accurate. Spore was a pile of meh to decent ideas that barely fit together. NMS is a cohesive game where the pieces fit together. The comparison to Spore is in the creators promising everything and the kitchen sink and not delivering. I still think its peoples fault for not knowing what the game was that they were buying. The $60 price tag is debatable, for sure.

Semi unrelated - the amount of misinformation that gets posted about this game is ludicrous. The gaming journalism just didn't play this game themselves and there's just so much incorrect shit out there. And a lot of people who just can't help but share their opinion played less then two hours (so they could get a Steam refund) so they just don't know half the shit they're spouting.

[Julius Seeker]

I wasn't trying to make the comparison between what people were expecting vs. What the game was. I was one of the few people who enjoyed SPORE; along with the guy who made No Man's Sky, who was a fan of the game as well. I was hoping this game would be similar to an expanded version of the space portion. But right now that doesn't seem to be the case, it seems like there's less to do, and that I'd probably have more fun just replaying SPORE.

The biggest issue I had with SPORE is that I wanted a less hands-on experience, I wanted something closer to SimCity or Sim Earth with the extra complexities of natural selection and space travel.

[Replay]

As a developer, I still think these guys hit one out of the park just via how much they actually did - but I still haven't played it, so I could be wrong. The bugs on the PC release, not acceptable; but the amount the game pushes technology forward is stunning. Teaching games to create worlds and experiences instead of just storing ones that humans coded themselves is not new; but the size and scope of the project in three dimensions is.

I think a lot of the discontent over this title is coming from people whose expectations are shaped by $100m+ AAA experiences and hoped it would be procedural Call of Duty or EVE or similar - people who are mad that the devs didn't model every single aspect of existence in a single game, basically - because they have *no* idea still how hard it is actually to create a title like this. You just can't model every type of gameplay in 3D with a team of just four people.

But hey, maybe it's really boring and I'm talking out of my ass. I just hate the tendency of the modern games fanbase to scream murder against developers if a title fails to satisfy their expectations in even the smallest way. I still wish more gamers would try to code and create themselves just to realize the insane difficulty that games development has as a discipline, and how grateful we should all be that our games work at all, given how insanely complex a modern AAA title on a modern piece of gaming hardware truly is.

[Eric]

No Man Sky has broken the lowest rating record on Steam



I think people's hype for this game was only matched by their disappointment followed by insane buyer's remorse.

[Shrinweck]

The NEXT update has me putting hours into this again and the game has improved a lot.

The reviews on Steam have switched to mixed. It's pretty crazy that this game isn't rated negative any more.